Eoghan O'Leary

Good morning, Pat.

Thanks for having me on again.

Well, yes, the first thing to say for students and their parents, just to put their mind at ease, students will score better in paper one than they actually felt on the day.

And students did, a lot of students did find it hard and some students found it very hard.

And to give a bit of an analogy here,

if they were in a marathon, it kind of started off okay, but the last few miles they found were like they were running uphill into the wind when they were coming to the finish line.

So they did find that very tough.

Absolutely, section A, absolutely, Pat.

And what I would say, just what you described there is what teachers, including myself and others, our first reaction when we looked at the paper was that section A, question one to six, were not too bad because they were what you might describe the classic type of questions.

While not being easy...

people would identify where the maths was and they would kind of know what to do.

That was a good start.

And Pat, in fairness, you're on 10 out of 10 for that part.

And the good news for students is that there were, I'm going to say, some accessible parts such as the one you just described there.

And the reality is this.

Those parts will be worth a lot of marks when it comes to the marking scheme.

because I was looking to have a great teacher named Joe Kingston, and he corrected state exams for 50 years.

And he always said the reality is a hard paper must be marked generously.

That's the way it has to go, because there has to be the bell curve that they expect at the end.

And as you said, there were some parts in there like you would have been greatly encouraged at the start.